Future Remains The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner what- soever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 50865- 8 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 50879- 5 (paper) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 50882- 5 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226508825.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Mitman, Gregg, editor. | Armiero, Marco, 1966– editor. | Emmett, Robert S., 1979– editor. Title: Future remains : a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene / edited by Gregg Mit- man, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009032 | ISBN 9780226508658 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226508795 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226508825 (e- book) Subjects: LCSH: Nature— Effect of human beings on. | Nature and civilization. | Human ecology. Classification: LCC GF75 .F88 2017 | DDC 304. 2— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov/ 2017009032 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). Edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett Future Remains A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Contents Acknowledgments vii Racism and the Anthropocene Preface ix Laura Pulido 116 Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett Sabotaging the Anthropocene; or, In Praise of Mutiny The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea 1 Marco Armiero 129 Rob Nixon LABORING HUBRIS On Possibility; or, The Monkey Anthropocene in a Jar 21 Wrench 141 Tomas Matza and Nicole Heller Daegan Miller Concretes Speak: A Play in One Act 29 The Germantown Calico Quilt 149 Rachel Harkness, Cristián Simonetti, Bethany Wiggin and Judith Winter Anthropocene Aesthetics The Age of (a) Man 40 Joseph Masco Robert S. Emmett 159 The Manual Pesticide Spray Pump 50 MAKING Michelle Mart and Cameron Muir The Mirror— Testing the Hubris or Humility? Genealogies Counter- Anthropocene 169 of the Anthropocene Sverker Sörlin Gregg Mitman 59 Objects from Anna Schwartz’s Cabinet of Curiosities 182 LIVING AND DYING Judit Hersko Huia Echoes 71 Technofossil 191 Julianne Lutz Warren Jared Farmer Snarge 81 Davies Creek Road 200 Gary Kroll Trisha Carroll and Mandy Martin Marine Animal Satellite Tags 89 Anthropocene Cabinets of Curiosity: Nils Hanwahr Objects of Strange Change Artificial Coral Reef 99 Libby Robin 205 Josh Wodak Cryogenic Freezer Box 108 Contributors 219 Elizabeth Hennessy Acknowledgments Future Remains, in its multistage format, including a slam, Cabinet of Curiosi- vii ties exhibition, and writing workshop, has been a particularly collective effort. The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, the Deutsches Museum, and the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, supported this project from its inception at a meeting in Munich in August 2013 into the present book form. In addition to the fantastic group of contributors rep- resented in these pages, we also want to thank all the participants and audience members in Madison and Munich who contributed ideas and creative energies through the wildly open format of the Anthropocene Slam in 2014 and “Wel- come to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands” exhibit at the Deutsches Museum. We are grateful for the work of the original Environmental Futures planning team, including Samer Alatout, Bill Cronon, Wilko Graf von Harden- berg, Richard Keller, Christof Mauch, Anne McClintock, Sabine Moedersheim, Rob Nixon, Lynn Nyhart, Marc Silberman, Sverker Sörlin, Helmuth Trischler, and Nina Wormbs, as well as the funding support made possible through a gen- erous grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to the Center for German and European Studies at the UW–Madison. A special thanks go to Garrett Dash Nelson for his heroic organizational efforts, to other members of the Anthropocene Slam selection committee, includ- viii Acknowledgments ing Heather Swan, and to our hosts in Madison in the fall of 2014, including Bill Cronon, and the CHE faculty, graduate students, staff, and community mem- bers. We are grateful to the Anonymous Fund, the Center for the Humanities, the Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research, the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, and the Nelson Institute for Environ- mental Studies at UW–Madison for their help in supporting Elizabeth Kolbert’s keynote lecture as part of the Anthropocene Slam. The Madison event would not have been possible without the support of Nelson Institute director Paul Robbins, and the efforts and talents of Nelson Institute staff including Danielle Lamberson Philipp, Andrew Ortman, Steve Pomplun, Hope Simon, and Ann Swenson. At the Rachel Carson Center (RCC), Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler provided input and support at critical moments, while Daniela Menge, Kim Coulter, Iris Trautmann, Carmen Dines, Marie Heinz, and Annka Liepold helped translate the conceptual cabinet into the museum and virtual exhibits (on www .environmentandsociety .org). The RCC also supported a pivotal writing work- shop held in July 2015 in Munich. Without generous research and travel support from the DAAD and Federal Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF), the international scope of this collaborative project would have been impossible. Spe- cial thanks to Lynn Keller and the CHE Steering Committee along with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory for making possible the production and printing of the color plates in the book. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Tim Flach for giving of his time, expertise, and remarkable talents to photograph and produce the objects for the volume. Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Tim Mennel, our editor at the University of Chicago Press, for his enthusiasm, insights, commitment, and belief in the project, and to our anonymous reviewers, who helped us to refine the conceptual framing and polish the individual fragments within this collection. Preface Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett Mitman, Armiero, and Emmett To consider humans as a geological force on Earth is to alter our very notions of ix time and history: geological, evolutionary, ecological, and human. As we become increasingly aware of humanity’s influence upon the biophysical systems of the entire planet, we find ourselves facing an uncertain future. The idea of the Anthropocene— a term coined in 2000 by paleoecologist Eugene Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen for this age of humans— has prompted scien- tists, artists, humanists, and social scientists to engage in new ways to understand the legacies of our species’ geomorphic and biomorphic powers. Whether or not the Anthropocene becomes part of the official stratigraphic record, its advent as a scientific object has already altered how we conceptualize, imagine, and inhabit time. We have not yet specified when the new era began. The Working Group on the Anthropocene recommended 1950 as the starting date because by then radioactive elements that marked the advent of the atomic bomb were detect- able across the globe. Others suggest it started thousands of years earlier, with the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period, when the cultivation of crops, domestication of animals, and large- scale human settlements began. The orien- tation of history is up for grabs— as are the objects that make up history’s archive, that foreshadow the future, and that will bear witness to a future past. By our objects will we know us. In the fall of 2014 the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, in collaboration with the x Mitman, Armiero, and Emmett Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and the Environ- mental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stock- holm, brought together artists and anthropologists, historians and geographers, literary scholars and biologists in the playful, performative space of an “Anthro- pocene Slam” to shape a Cabinet of Curiosities for this new age of humans. The responsive, creative spirit of the slam invited freestyle conversation, debate, and reflection on what such a cabinet should be. What objects should it house? Which issues should it speak to? What emotions might it evoke? And what range of meanings and moral tales might it contain? Above all, in this era of extreme hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather, and extreme economic disparity, how might certain objects make visible the uneven interplay of economic, material, and social forces that shape the rela- tionships among human and nonhuman beings? The Anthropocene is a narrative about space, as well as time. Its sheer scope— for example, the global scale of warming temperatures, species extinction, ocean acidification— risks obliterating the differences through which its impacts are felt by different beings, occupying different ways of life, in locales across the planet. Slam performers dramatized, versed, and otherwise made visible the ways that planetary-scale changes become apparent and leave traces in both space and time. One participant taught the audience to fold origami passenger pigeons, a species hunted to extinction within the span of 100 years. Dozens of paper birds took flight in symbolic de- extinction. Another group poured a test slab of concrete on stage and intoned an imagined chorus for this most widely used material in our increasingly built environment. Thus the objects, images, and echoes on the slam stage evoked the sedimentary remains of humanity’s impact on Earth.